


sometimes you really can go home again

by gatsbyparty



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Explicit Language, Gen, Introspection, PTSD, revised and expanded or whatever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-14
Updated: 2012-11-14
Packaged: 2017-11-18 16:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/562944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the destruction of the Reapers and subsequent damage of the mass relays, Commander Shepard comes to terms with the decisions she's made.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sometimes you really can go home again

**Author's Note:**

> For this fic, I went with the idea that the relays were damaged instead of destroyed, and I changed the Normandy being stranded to the Normandy gone dead in Council space. I did my best to portray PTSD accurately; however, it's a very variable disorder, with widely different symptoms depending on the case. I have never experienced it firsthand. If anything in my portrayal is offensive or inaccurate, please tell me so I can fix it to better reflect reality.

  
  
sentinel paragon shepard  
  
[After the destruction of the Reapers and subsequent damage of the mass relays, Commander Shepard comes to terms with the decisions she’s made.]  
  
  
It’s not that Shepard has never knocked herself unconscious: it’s nigh on impossible for a gangly kid on a frigate not to run headfirst into a bulkhead or pop herself in the face with a riflebutt when she shouldn’t be on the firing range. It’s definitely not that she’s never been in pain: she’s broken both arms on several occasions and she did wake up in a Cerberus facility with a significant fraction of her body replaced by cybernetics. This time, really, the whole indignity of the situation is that she’s stuck in the still-hot cracked-out remains of her armor, her face feels like one big bruise, biotics are a crapshoot with a concussion,  there’s a Reaper tentacle pinning down most of her body, and she doesn’t even have the dignity to black out.  
  
She lies in the rubble, staring up at the ashes raining down, and waits. Her membranous tissues begin to dry out with a maddening itchy ache.  
  
 _The ship has weather'd every rack, the prize we sought is won_ , she thinks, wry and tired, the first conscious thought of her third life.   
  
Her chest rises once of its own accord, pushed up by brain activity reigniting cybernetics, and then continues rising and falling as her lungs get the picture.  
  
“Well,” she says irritably into the melted slag that used to be her omnitool, “someone better have a fucking drink on hand when they find me.”  
  
The flames die down. Her armor starts to cool. The Reaper gives a heaving wheeze and sags.  
  
“Did an alien just fart on me?” she wants to know, and somehow, this is the worst part: that the body of an eldritch horror that had done an excellent job of nearly sending her species into extinction may have expelled bodily gases onto her as it dies.   
  
“Alright, so, all my tomorrows for another today,” she says, vision beginning to rock and wobble, and contorts to shove her shoulder under the edge of the tentacle. She pushes and twists herself round until she can brace with her good leg, and from there it’s just a matter of desperately hauling herself topside of the tentacle before it rolls back down and breaks her other leg. Strong enough to punch a marauder out in one, strong enough to make it out of here. There’s a marine on the other side, young, with half her face scraped away. Shepard sets her mouth and starts dragging herself toward the sound of gunfire.  
  
Pulmonary contusion, she thinks, broken femur, concussion, probable broken ribs.   
The tentacle has to be coming onto a quarter of a mile long before it starts to taper down. Shepard gets a bit woozy at the decline. There are more marines, eventually, mopping up, covering each other.  
  
They scream like wild things in their victory, look at her like they’ve seen a ghost. One, a man with patchy red stubble, pauses with his hand on the trigger, calmly holsters his pistol, and rips his helmet off to stare.  
  
“Commander Shepard?” he asks, aghast. “Are you alive?”  
  
Shepard waves weakly, light-headed.  
  
“Anyone got a water bottle on ‘em?”  
  
The ginger marine draw and shoots a marauder to his left without looking and, after flashing signals to his team, hurries forward to help Shepard sit up without keeling over on her bad leg.   
  
“Sorry, ma’am, but we don’t even have that much,” he says, fluttering his hands over her helmet like it’s an egg. “Do you want this off? Hey, Rodrigues, get someone on the comm, we got Commander Shepard over here.”  
  
The shuttle is there fast enough that Shepard doesn’t have to shout, and close enough that when the ginger marine boosts her up she can stiffen her bad leg and hobble on.   
  
As Shepard could have predicted, she doesn’t black out on the shuttle ride back to FOB, either. For a matter of fact, she doesn’t black out until they anesthetize her, and her cybernetics chew up the morphine like candy, so when she wakes up the first time after the surgery, her nerves are still on fire.   
  
She reaches up, clawing at the oxygen mask, back arching off the bed, and her scream is the cry of a frightened child.   
  
Miranda's voice, cool hands on her chest: "Shepard, everyone is alright, but we need you to stay under-"  
  
“You need to increase the sedatives-”  
  
Mordin whispers something in her ear, and the medication takes her under again.   
  
“Commander Shepard,” Dr. Chakwas says from a stool beside the cot. There are stiff, tacky patches beside Shepard’s hands. She wonders if the blood is hers, or some poor bastard’s who got shunted off his cot to make way for her.   
  
“Doctor,” Shepard says, or tries to, but her throat is dry as space itself and it comes out as a choky wheeze. She fumbles her hands around the water bottle Chakwas hands over, and after draining half the bottle, her mind already feels clearer. Accelerated healing, she thinks with a start. She’d forgotten how quickly she could bounce back, after the last month when it’s just been bruise after snapped finger after broken tailbone.   
  
“We didn’t expect you to survive.”  
  
“It was a surprise to me too, doctor.”  
  
“You ruptured your pancreas, among other things,” Chakwas says before Shepard can ask. “You would not have been put under otherwise.”  
  
“Right. Is everything-is everyone-”  
  
“Commander, I think you ought to wait until your pupils are the same size before you try and rebuild London single handedly,” Chakwas says, amused, but she’s already got her forearm pinning Shepard back before Shepard realizes just how hard it is to bend.  
  
“Yeah, I guess I could give that concession.”  
  
“I don’t think you have much choice, ma’am.”  
  
“I think, technically, you outrank me right now,” Shepard says with a faint smile, reaching up to touch a scabbed line on her cheek. “How long was I out?”  
  
“Not quite three hours this time. Two hours, last time you woke. We had you on nearly sixty milligrams of morphine after that. Somehow I was the only one unsurprised when you began to have breathing problems,” Chakwas says. Her voice is tight, still distantly amused but now with a distinct overtone of irritation. “I should think that it’s nearly out of your system, though. I still remember how quickly you went off to piss off the whole galaxy after Freedom’s Progress.”  
  
“As it turns out, taking on an YMIR mech with an omniblade is not a sound tactical decision,” Shepard says wryly, settling down against the cot. Her armor is gone, the burns with it, and she’s in a pullover sweatshirt that’s weapons-grade hideous and workout pants. “No hospital gown?”  
  
“Sanitation is really one of the least of our concerns, I think. Also, your sweatshirt buttons up the back.”  
  
“It’s...lovely.”  
  
“Commander, has anyone ever told you that when you lie, you tuck the corner of your mouth in?”  
  
“It’s been mentioned once or twice.”  
  
Shepard upends the bottle of water into her mouth and wipes her lips with her sleeve.   
  
“Alright. I’m not going to get up but I need you to tell me who made it.”  
  
“We got very lucky, Shepard,” Chakwas says, eyes narrowing. “Normandy went dead in space after whatever you did to the relays, as did every other ship in the fleet. Casualties are still climbing, but are estimated to be in the double millions.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“And all of your people made it out, Commander. You didn’t lose anyone that you hadn’t already.”  
  
Anyone she hadn’t already lost: Tali and Legion at once, from her inability to talk fast enough or hard enough or something, but damn if that still wasn’t a sore spot. Mordin. She’s had dreams of “I made a mistake!” on endless anguished replay. She thinks of the look on his face in the med bay, talking about testing seashells, and how he’d looked sucker punched when she’d drawn her gun.  
  
She didn’t pull the trigger. Couldn’t. He was right, of course. Someone else might have gotten it wrong. Didn’t make it hurt any less.  
  
"What's done is done, I guess. The Reapers are gone?"   
  
"So far as we know. Everyone has been...very cautiously relaxing."   
  
Shepard rubs her forehead wearily. Something about all this went right, finally. She supposes everyone deserves a break eventually, even the terminally unlucky savior of the galaxy.   
  
"Do you feel alright, commander?"  
  
Shepard laughs uproariously without humor until she doubles over in pain, wheezing.   
  
"Doctor, I was dead not all that long ago."   
  
"Yes," Chakwas says, pursing her mouth and watching Shepard with a look she can't read. "Well, you ought to be resting. I'll be back in a bit to wake you up."  
  
Shepard is asleep before the door is scraped shut, and in the hours that follow, she fights through London a hundred times.   
  
The hospital where the crew of the Normandy was taken in the hours after the battle is not so much a hospital as a mostly-unburnt wreck of an office building with all four walls. There are still bodies piled in the street, mostly marauders, but there is at least one banshee's belly poking above the top. Liara T'soni is gang pressed into minor surgery within moments of arrival, as are Dr Chakwas and everyone with the slightest amount of medical training. Normandy's crew is luckier than much of the fleet, in that they are alive, and luckier than any of the marines on Earth. All of the fleet survivors are nearly unharmed except for several cases of smoke inhalation.   
  
Garrus Vakarian is released after less than an hour, with strict orders not to get in anyone's way. After a little wheedling with a dead-walking EMT, he finds that Shepard is on the ground floor. The weight of her cybernetics would be a serious strain on any other floor.   
  
He walks into the room without knocking and is treated to the sight of Vanya Shepard, survivor of Akuze and destroyer of the Reapers, in a hideous pullover sweater and workout pants, eating mashed potatoes out of a reused Earth-brand butter container. She looks up, startled, with the end of the spoon sticking out of her mouth, and though she’s clearly unarmed, there’s the distinctive woomph of biotics just above Garrus’ fringe. It’s a reminder, however unconscious, that even vulnerable, Shepard is still capable of tearing a head off its body. He thinks that’s probably why there isn’t a guard outside the door.   
  
“Oh,” Shepard says around the spoon, and the warp bubble fizzes out. “Uh. Sorry.”  
  
"Are you alright?"   
  
"Why does everyone seem to think I need to be wrapped in cotton? I'm Commander goddamn Shepard, Garrus, I'm fine. Stop lurking in the doorway like a plague doctor."   
  
“It has been less than a day.”  
  
“Eighteen hours is plenty of time. Bring on the next crisis!”  
  
She laughs, stabbing the spoon into the potatoes, but the bitterness in her voice is unmistakable.   
  
Chakwas, in the moment or two she can carve out of her night to check on Shepard, looking harried and exhausted, tells Shepard flat out that she is not to get out of bed.  
  
Shepard is wandering the streets of London before dawn. She’s only a little concussed, after all, and she’s a biotic, and there are marines scattered around the city. It’s not that dangerous. She crouches in the ruins of Big Ben as the sun rises, the enhanced photoreceptors in her pupils winding tight in the brightness. Commander Shepard, savior of the citadel and hero of the entire galaxy, schlepping around a ruined city in her pajamas.   
  
She wishes for her armor and she hops down and comes across yet another pile of bodies. This one is nearly all banshees. She hears an unearthly howl and stiffens, wreathing a biotic shield around herself instinctively.   
  
A banshee’s head rolls to the side. Its fringe wobbles and tosses off sparks. Shepard hurls it away with her biotics, dropping into a crouch like she’s about to swing the Cain to her shoulder, but she’s unarmed. No one would give her a gun and she hasn’t seen any of hers since she was hit by Harbinger.  
  
“Oh, are you fucking kidding me,” Shepard whispers, dropping the shield and watching the dead banshee roll limply. Now she realizes the howl is a fire engine, can see the lights flickering over the buildings, and the wind is picking up. She stands and strides toward the banshee, levelling a vicious kick at its head. She stomps the banshee into a mush and storms back to FOB, swearing at herself.   
  
“Do you think you’re gonna retire?” Kaidan asks later, after Shepard has shouted her way into being released from the hospital. There’s always someone else who needs the bed, and there’s nothing left to do for Shepard but wait for her organic bits to catch up to her cybernetic bits. She’s back into armor, even if it’s just thin ceramic plating over synthetic fabric. She’s got an Avenger M-8 at hand.  
  
“I’m only enjoying myself when I’m on the run,” Shepard points out. “I’m not retiring until I outrank my mother.”  
  
“Your mother is a real force of nature.”  
  
“So I’ll never retire, essentially.”  
  
“That sounds exhausting.”  
  
Shepard gives Kaidan a hard grin. There’s no amusement in her eyes. There isn’t much of anything in her eyes; she’s as uncanny as a VI.   
  
“That’s funny coming from a career soldier. Look, Kaidan, what isn’t going to be a vacation compared to the last few months?”  
  
“Shepard, are you alright?”  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m fine.”  
  
Kaidan lifts an eyebrow. What he’s noticed that Shepard hasn’t is this: the Avenger has no clips, her hands are shaking, and every time he moves she looks over his shoulder like someone’s standing behind him with a muzzle pressed to his skull.   
  
“If you say so,” he concedes, while sending a message to Chakwas on his omnitool.   
  
Six months pass. There’s no end to the digging, dragging, dying. The casualties are finalized in the double billions, between all the species of the alliance. Arlington isn’t big enough for the ashy remains of Hammer. Earth’s shipyards and orbital stations aren’t big enough for the thousands of empty hulls. Refugees begin to trickle to their homes.  
  
The ships are melted down. Memorials are placed in every major human city across the colonies, from Earth to Eden Prime to the SR-1 crash site.   
  
There is no one on the human homeworld that escaped unscathed. Shepard returns to the Normandy, which is on permanent loan to Shepard and her crew. She figures this is her reward for sitting up and rolling over on command. One wall of her cabin is plastered layers-deep with paper drawings and printouts from children of every species: the turians draw her charging into fire, the krogans draw her headbutting Reapers. There are fewer asari than others, but Shepard is universally given head tentacles. The human children draw her in brilliant primary colors, lipstick red armor and hot red hair and mint blue eyes.  
  
She is holding their hands, or balancing Earth in her arms like Atlas, or grinning behind a helmet with a stick tank in one hand. Shepard is forced to wonder if children are no longer being taught that a tank is not, in fact, a gun.   
  
She sits at her desk with her chin in her hand and her other hand tapping on the terminal’s keyboard, and she looks now and then at the pictures. She thinks: _I am a hero_. The words ring flat, like being called by the wrong name. She tries: _I saved who I could._ This feels like she is a whiny child protesting punishment. Then: _I reached my limits._ This is patently false, she tells herself. There is always something more she could have done. She thinks: _I made too many mistakes._ This, Shepard knows, is the truth, no matter what anyone else might say.  
  
If she was smarter, faster, more prepared, maybe she could have stopped Legion from uploading himself. Maybe she could have caught Tali’s hand. At the very least, she could have lost one friend that day on Rannoch instead of two. If she was more charming-smarter-more charismatic-more ruthless, maybe she could have stopped Mordin from getting on the elevator.  
  
“Sleep,” Chakwas says over and over. “If you don’t sleep then you certainly won’t improve. You need rest, Shepard, time and rest above all.”  
  
Shepard knows that there is no respite in dreaming, though. She doesn’t have nightmares, after the first few nights _(“Was there really no other way?” “The aftermath seemed secondary. We needed to win.”_ ). That would be too easy. She dreams of the crystal spires on Thessia, Thane and his son, Anderson laughing over a morning cup of coffee, Ash putting on her lipstick in Afterlife’s bathroom. There are good things in the galaxy. She just has to find them.  
  
She doesn’t _deserve_ them.  
  
The first anniversary of what has come to be called V-S Day arrives all too quickly. Shepard is asked to speak at the memorial in London, the one with her helmet cast in brass on the top. The morning light reflects off the memorial and the river.   
  
“I’m not here to tell you that things are fine, that we’ve completely recovered,” Shepard says, looking out into the tightly packed, hand-picked crowds of observers and the dozens of media cams. “But I am here to tell you that hope is here to stay, and that what we need is patience.”  
  
She speaks for forty five minutes, until her throat is dry and her head is swimming in the heat. The crowd is in tears by the time she is done. The Reaper attacks were not like other wars, where the only ones with direct involvement were the soldiers or those around them. Everyone was a soldier. On the way to the shuttle, Shepard pauses by a dark-eyed teenage boy.  
  
“I’ve seen you before,” she says without preamble. Obviously startled, the boy’s hands dart upward like he’s going for a gun strapped to his back.   
  
“Um. Ma’am?”  
  
“Shepard,” she corrects with a grin, though it feels contrary to the day to be smiling. “You’re wearing jeans. You’re not Alliance. Don’t call me ma’am.”  
  
The kid stares at her, slack jawed, for several seconds. He flushes bright red.  
  
“Um.”  
  
“Where have I seen you? Come on, speak up, I’m not going to headbutt you.”  
  
“I was at Grissom Academy. Ma’am.”  
  
“Aw, what the hell did I just say?” Shepard says incredulously, struggling not to laugh. “Really? Grissom? I didn’t think there was anyone your age there.”  
  
“I’m eighteen, Commander.”  
  
Shepard lifts an eyebrow. The kid comes up to her chin, and while Shepard is a tall woman, she would still be a short man.  
  
“Sure about that?”  
  
“Hell yeah.”  
  
She purses her mouth, nodding.  
  
“Yeah. Good. You going to do something with yourself?”  
  
The kid grins, his flush fading.  
  
“Yeah, Commander, I sure am. I start at UMars in the fall. Shuttle engineering.”  
  
“I’m glad to hear it. Send me a letter sometime, let me know how it’s going,” Shepard says, claps the kid on the shoulder, and breezes past to the shuttle. She sits in her cabin, waits for Garrus to ping the door, and steadfastly doesn’t jump when he touches her hair.  
  
“Hey,” Shepard says, making an effort not to sound exhausted.   
  
“I brought jello,” Garrus says, putting the tray down on her desk. He did bring jello.   
  
“Garrus,” Shepard says after a moment, “is this _all_ of the jello?”  
  
“Not all of it.”  
  
“Well, hell, thanks.”  
  
There’s no spoon, but two of her pens haven’t been dropped on the floor in a while, and anyway, jello isn’t really all that different from sushi. Garrus looks absolutely fascinated.  
  
“Human mouths are so flexible,” he says when prodded. “I don’t know how you make those shapes.”  
  
“Shapes?” Shepard asks around a mouthful of red jello.   
  
“Like that. Or the faces you make.”  
  
“I do not make faces,” Shepard says violently after swallowing.   
  
“At babies. At the kid on Earth. At Kaidan. At Joker. You make faces all the time, Shepard.”  
  
“Not, like, weird faces, though?”  
  
“Yes. Weird faces.”  
  
“Oh no,” Shepard groans, reaching for more jello. “I’m going to become a joke to the entire galaxy at this rate.”  
  
Humans spend nearly all of their time reading each others’ facial expressions and Garrus is an alien, of course, but Shepard is sure that she can tell when he’s smiling by now.   
  
“How’d you make jello?” she asks after a moment.  
  
“Very carefully,” he says. “You know, you didn’t even look up when I came in.”  
  
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says flatly. “I’m not on red alert and I have pills that work for about ten minutes and I just want to sit with an old friend and laugh about the things we’ve done.”  
  
“You’re learning distress tolerance,” Garrus says carefully, clearly unsure of where the boundaries lie. “I’m not human, Shepard. I’m not going to treat you in a way other than what you can handle.”  
  
“Don’t apply military philosophy to relationships.”  
  
“If it’s what works.”  
  
“Well,” she says, stabbing a cube of jello and watching the ink bleed. “I guess.”  
  
So Shepard begins to smile and laugh, if not often or loudly. She sits in the mess now and then, tries dextro food for the first time, spends the night in the med bay with an allergic reaction. If things are not great, if Shepard loses hours staring into the black and can’t listen to Tennyson, it’s better than how it was before. She takes her old helmet, the one still crusted with ash and blood, and she sets it at the foot of the memorial wall.   
  
“Commander, you’ve got a message-” Traynor begins on an afternoon much later.  
  
“At my private terminal,” Shepard finishes, flashes a grin at Traynor’s affronted look, and keys up the screen.

  
  
From: Kájin Soukup  
To: Commander Shepard  
  


I know that you’re very busy, and that you were probably taking the piss when you said to send you a letter, but I can’t find it in me to be embarrassed that I’m writing you. There’s really no one else for me to tell, because my parents didn’t exactly make it off Earth. I’m not the only person to have a story like that. It’s not a big deal. I just wanted to tell you that today we got our first semester grades, and I’m second in the class overall. I never would have gotten this chance if you didn’t take the time to come to Grissom. Thank you, Commander. Thank you so much.

 

  
  
Shepard blinks hard and exits the message. That, she realizes, must be the kid from the memorial. She’s glad. It lifts the weight of her memories, to see proof that she’s helped. It reminds her of the very beginning of the war, when it had been about individuals instead of races, before the small things became things too large to bear thinking about.   
  
With this in mind, she tries harder to make things about individuals, although not in the way she’s been doing. She meets Urdnot Mordin. She gives in to Chakwas and takes medical leave and travels with Javik. Behind his scathing opinions is genuine curiosity and a mind that could have been a scholar; in Javik, Shepard sees how lucky she has been, that her homeworld remains.   
  
Later, she sleeps, and wakes to a better world.


End file.
